Data management is an important facet of corporate profitability. Thus, ensuring the availability of the data to an enterprise is a primary objective of database administrators. Companies typically have multiple databases that need to be protected by backup and replication procedure. High availability techniques are employed to ensure that data is safely stored and readily available to user and system access. However, even the most effective and efficient techniques have limitations where small segments of data remain vulnerable to people, process and technology barriers.
Such is the case where data sent for storage (or replication) is not successfully stored at the destination system, and hence, needs to be resent expeditiously to complete the process. The data (which can be on the order of gigabytes in size) then has to be re-sent thereby consuming additional hardware and software resources at the server level and the network level.
The performance analysis associated with retaining a copy of the data at a remote location indicates that the files added to the remote location are at least twice as expensive as those files that are not. This is attributed to the lifetime of data that is added being much longer than the data delivered and deleted right away. The performance degrades as the lifetime of the data increases until the data is removed from the database memory cache or the data is removed from the database logs and is applied to the database causing random input/output operations.